That's bad news for anyone awaiting another song like Kids. That synthpop tune, the band's most successful single, won the admiration of everyone from Nokia to Nicolas Sarkozy. Rumour held that MGMT's label were allegedly hassling them for a soundalike, but Andrew VanWyngarden, the other half of the band, denied the claims. "There's no illusion on [Columbia's] part that we're going to turn into a Top 40 band," he said. "That's kind of comforting."

Instead of following the pop charts, MGMT have been holed up in a rural New York cabin, listening to Aphex Twin and house music. Goldwasser and VanWyngarden worked alone with producer Dave Fridmann, who also helmed the duo's debut. "We'll get involved in what we're doing, and the next thing we know, we've been improvising for five hours," Goldwasser said.

The new record will apparently continue the musical precedent set by Congratulations, which was more or less a commercial flop. "People thought we took too many drugs, which was not the case at all," Goldwasser said. The new songs include Alien Days, inspired by "that feeling when a parasitic alien is in your head, controlling things", VanWyngarden explained. To "get back to planet Earth," Fridmann said, they also recorded an obscure cover – the 1968 folk-rock tune Introspection by Faine Jade.